May 2, 2006
n + 1 issue four
I picked up the new issue of n + i last night, and every piece of writing I have read so far—the letters to the editor and contributions to the "American Writing Today" portfolio by Vivian Gornick and Gerald Howard—has mentioned (or was written by) James Wood. Is Wood the "N" in n +1?
Gornick's essay, on memoir and criticism, is especially interesting because neither of the two writers on whom she focuses are American. (Given that she is perhaps the most eminent contributor, could this be the strongest statement about American writing in the whole portfolio of nine essays?) She attempts to correct publishers' consensus that German writer W. G. Sebald was a novelist, noting that "Sebald is transparently what I will call a memoirist." She continues:
Every instinct for literature that I possess tells me that his is the odd but striking voice of a nonfictionist writing to puzzle out a position that will let him include himself in what he experiences as a ghost-ridden universe, at whose wavering edge he stands, alternately staring out at the emptiness beyond, and back at the silence of a world now peculiarly motionless. The "ghosts" are everything that has come before: the sum of human history, which the narrator connects to with an associativeness that is unaccountably deep, moving, mysterious. War, fable, architecture; medicine, philosophy, trade routes; old newspaper scandals, hotel lobbies, buried resort towns; literary unhappiness and political martyrdom—he remembers them all with an act of recall so strong that the connections transmuate his feeling into hope rather than despair . . . . We are here, this writing tells us, not to mourn lost worlds but to see things as they are: to take in the is-ness of what is. Consciousness is our only salvation.
The last line of the above paragraph would doubtless provoke an assenting nod from Wood. Later in her piece, Gornick deftly summarizes in one paragraph what other critics of Wood's writing have spent pages and pages (or, more precisely, screens and screens of weblog real-estate) concluding:
James Wood is a strong critic because he comes alive when he is reading. He may not understand better than anyone else what his time and place is about, but he knows when the book in his hand hits a nerve. I feel the same; it's only that Wood's nerve is located in a different part of his reading body than mine. Which means that it takes a great number of critics to piece together a revealing portrait of a literary period; one that reflects the way it feels to be reading and writing at this time, in this place.